For most of us, gardens are spaces that evolve over time. You may enlist the help of a garden designer or landscaper for larger jobs, or if you're particularly green-fingered, you might prefer to tackle it all yourself. But ultimately, your space will change and develop as the seasons do.
Winner of Ideal Home's Best Garden 2024, this stunning garden in Surrey is a perfect example of an ever-evolving garden. It's a spacious plot, with lawns and mature trees at the front. When they bought the house, the garden was little more than a large featureless plot with poor soil, but over the years the owners have transformed it into a flower-filled, multi-zoned garden packed with wildlife.
'When we moved in, there was a little terrace of very old crazy paving, and the remains of a pond, all filled in with rubble,' she says, 'while the rest was mostly grass, the borders had been overtaken by huge, light-blocking laurels, and rabbits were eating everything.'
